The M.C. Who Fell to Earth

Anybody who reports on the arts will eventually feel the fear of crying wolf: If I tell people that I just saw the greatest thing ever, will it undo the last time I said it? How many times can you say something like that before all the claims coalesce into a weak mist of approval? We’ll find out. On Tuesday night, watching Kanye West perform at the Barclays Center, I felt roughly the same exhilaration as the sixteen-year-old who I was standing next to. Even the cold oddsmaker in me had the same take—is there anyone like Kanye now? Has there ever been? No. “Yeezus” felt like the album of the year months ago; now the year just feels like it belongs to West. Or, more accurately, the moment keeps being his. In only the past few days, West lectured on design at Harvard; released a terrible video starring his fiancée, which may lead to a brief spike in flannel sales; watched David Blaine pull an ice pick out of his hand; and accused President Obama of using him as a convenient foil. And all of that was just a weird salad bar next to the emotional and aesthetic pummelling of the “Yeezus” show.

A friend e-mailed me the next day about Tuesday night’s performance, saying that it was “so everything.” Which is what made all the risk feel sincere rather than self-congratulatory. Wearing tweaked couture and framed by sci-fi film sets, West moved from scene to scene, from song to song, rarely standing in any one spot for longer than a few minutes. Megalomaniacs drive us to revulsion when we think of them lounging around and collecting our money. But West works so hard at dragging himself through all the stations he’s set up for himself that he feels like the opposite of a fraud, or a jackass, or whatever else people call him. It would be perverse to not want him, and his drive, in the world.

It’s also easy to mock this show if you don’t like West. He spent the night wearing a series of masks, designed by Margiela, that made him look like the Batman villain Bane had run into a chandelier and hopped on the Q train to Barclays. There were dancers in bodysuits who resembled David Bowie’s alien family in “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” At one point, West was stalked for over ten minutes by a crouching dancer dressed up as something like a black spider crossed with a yak, fitted with red L.E.D.s for eyes. Much of the show took place on a fake iceberg, which also served as a mountain and a volcano. And Jesus was West’s final guest. His glorious theatrical delirium looked like a stack of yard sale VHS tapes from the seventies had been fed into a 3-D printer and rendered as a shock-mounted geodesic form.

And yet the word I wrote on my hand in the middle of the show was “tender.” The performance moved, first, through almost all of “Yeezus”—a collection of harsh electronic pieces. Alongside many of the original backing tracks, West’s music was filled out by a small band: the keyboardist and guitarist Mike Dean, DJ Mano, and the singer Tony Williams, West’s cousin and longtime collaborator. The live versions were remarkably close to the recorded versions, with occasional dips into other people’s catalogues. (The band played a snippet of M.O.P.’s “Cold As Ice,” and West performed a revised version of Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like.”) Eventually, West moved into songs, like “Runaway,” from the album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” and older songs like “Through the Wire” and “Good Life.”

The mood was so dark that this kind of cohesion didn’t come easily; early on, I assumed that there was no way that West could fit a song like “Through the Wire”—anchored by a Chaka Khan sample—into a set that was so aggressive and wired, in every sense. When he was singing through a beaded mask and his pale dancers were standing stock-still on the iceberg, it felt like West had designed the show by writing the word “spooky” a hundred times on a piece of paper.

But the show moved quickly, insofar as a two-hour-plus show can move quickly. West just hurls himself into the music. On the “Watch the Throne” tour, West seemed hemmed in, possibly because of the staging, possibly because he was standing next to his mentor, Jay-Z (then hyphenated). Now he’s talked himself into the confidence that he’s both claimed and dissected for years. The way to make a show this loony work is to commit to it, entirely, bodily, and so he did. West rapped with his shirt off, and he let his army of living mannequins hold him aloft. He repeatedly worked against the springy, triangular chunk of platform that reached into the audience, a small ice floe, by the look of things. He especially liked stomping on one corner, making the structure wobble and buck. He lay on his back in various places, and, at one point, when the ice wedge hove into the air like a whale was sitting on the opposite end, he sat on the raised peak and basked in applause, one leg bent, the other dangling. Me and my iceberg, guys. The dumb visual pun right there: chilling.

There were perorations between songs that fell between banter and preaching and eventually turned into singing, most of it Auto-Tuned. He talked about a businessman who had recently said that he didn’t like the way West was handling himself, an idea he rebuked at length. His best ranting moment was tying his own work to that of the inventor Nikola Tesla and the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. “People are still ripping Jodorowsky off,” he yelled. “Still!” West mentioned Jodorowsky’s “Holy Mountain,” an obvious inspiration for West’s nameless female crew, surreal juxtapositions, and for, you know, the mountain. So West was foregrounding his own borrowings while, at the same time, highlighting his role as an idea-generator. But his rants became less blustery as the night went on. A defense of his constant claims to be a genius was that his genius is “a burden” and that his dreams keep him up at night. He eventually turned “my dreams keep me up at night” into a soft motif that he repeated as he walked offstage, singing over the chords from “Lost in the World.” By the end of the night, he had written himself off, telling the crowd, “The truth is inside you.” “Don’t listen to anyone,” he said, slumped on his knees. “Don’t listen to me.”

This was, of course, the only thing that we couldn’t do.

Photograph courtesy of A.E.G.

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.